The Lost Ark of the Covenant: Solving the 2,500 Year Old Mystery of
the Fabled Biblical Ark By Tudor Parfitt Harper One, San Francisco,
2008, $25.95, pp.384

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Like the quest for the Holy Grail--the cup from which Jesus is said
to have sipped at the Last Supper--the search for the lost Ark of the
Covenant has inspired scholars and adventurers since it vanished
following the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 587 BC. Accounts
differ, but reports in Arabic and various texts suggested that the
Israelites still marched with the Ark at the head of their armies long
after its putative disappearance. The legend is that as long as they
possessed the Ark, which held the original tablets inscribed with the
Ten Commandments, they could not be vanquished. It was a treasure indeed
worth having.

Popular interest in the search for the Ark was most recently
revived by the Steven Spielberg blockbuster movie, Raiders of the Lost
Ark, whose hero may have been loosely based on real American adventurer
Vendyl Jones. Hyperbolic and fantastic as the film and its sequels
seemed, the actual search for the Ark has led a number of archaeologists
and adventurers into feats of extraordinary foolhardiness and ambition.
The Knights Templar conducted extensive excavation of the Temple Mount
during the Crusades of the 11th and 12th centuries.

Now Tudor Parfitt--professor of Jewish studies at London's
School of Oriental and African Studies and a fellow at the Oxford Centre
of Hebrew and Jewish Studies as well as at Harvard--has joined the
quest. He comes armed with passion, curiosity, fine wit and a
story-telling style that makes this enormously erudite book irresistible
to any reader with an ounce of romance in his or her soul.

Parfitt has been tracking the lost tribes of Israel for more than
two decades and became interested in the fabled Ark in 1987 while living
with the Lemba tribe in Zimbabwe. Claiming descent from the Israelites,
the Lemba captivated Parfitt with their dignity, rituals and dancing. He
was particularly intrigued by their most sacred object, the ngoma lungundu, which they imbued with secrecy, mystery and supernatural
power. Like the Ark, the ngoma was carried into battle on the shoulders
of tribal priests as a guarantor of victory; it was never allowed to
touch the ground, and was regarded as both highly dangerous and divine.
According to the Lemba, it destroyed anyone who touched it except for
members of the priestly Buba caste.

Parfitt was struck by resemblances to biblical descriptions of the
powers and properties of the Ark, but as a scholar he dismissed them as
"...an interesting comparison, but no more than that," because
of significant differences. The Ark, according to biblical accounts, was

a wooden chest decorated with gold and cherubim that contained the
original commandments and, in some accounts, Aaron's rod, or wand.
The ngoma, on the other hand, was a wooden drum, and while the Lemba
insisted that sacred objects were carried within it, they refused to
reveal what these were or where the ngoma itself might be found.
Nevertheless, they insisted that it was a powerful weapon that terrified their enemies.

Five years later in Jerusalem, the saga of the Ark and its
whereabouts took a new turn when Parfitt encountered Reuven ben Arieh, a
financier, diamond merchant and Holocaust survivor who had given himself
a sacred mission: nothing less than to end anti-Semitism once and for
all. His solution? Find the Ark of the Covenant, return it to Jerusalem
and place it in a newly constructed Third Temple. Ben Arieh had come
across a passage in the Koran, which read, "Muhammed considered the
restoration of the Ark to the Jews to be a sign of the kingship of
Solomon." He therefore believed contemporary Muslims would accept
the restored Ark as a convincing sign of Israel's political
legitimacy.

While attracted to the idea of peace in the Middle East, Parfitt
had doubts about a lightning transformation of the region. Nevertheless,
he was excited by the prospect of finding the Ark, and almost equally
fascinated by the handsome, bold and enigmatic Ben Arieh. An Orthodox
Jew who often dressed in stylish, imported French versions of the
orthodox costume--when he wasn't wearing conventional blazers,
Turnbull and Asser shirts and Hermes' ties--Ben Arieh's
personality seemed to shift inexplicably along with his attire. He was
well-connected and possessed a trove of arcane knowledge and useful
information about the Ark. He was also wealthy enough to bankroll the
search and a salary to a brilliant but highly eccentric Coptic
scholar,Daud Labib. Labib occasionally dressed as a priest, had a
penchant for tantrums and prostitutes and was given to sudden
inexplicable mood changes. Although Labib was a virulent anti-Zionist,
he was happy to join the quest because he needed funds to complete his
doctorate, and to pay for a hoped-for marriage.

Pursuing the Ark, Parfitt traversed the politically treacherous
terrain of Egypt, Israel, Yemen and Ethiopia during the 1990s and even
went off on a wild goose chase to New Guinea. There he examined claims
of a Papuan tribe, the Gogodala, who--like the Lemba--believed they were
descended from the Israelites, and offered to show him the hiding place
of the Ark. This turned out to be a dead end, but research on the coast
of East Africa proved more fruitful.

Wherever he went, Parfitt encountered two kinds of adventure. One
was physical: political threats and assassinations, venomous snakes,
wild pig ticks (whose ravenous habits make Lyme disease seem almost
benign), crocodiles and potentially hostile tribesmen not eager to give
up their secrets. Unlike Indiana Jones, who arrived with high boots and
a bullwhip to cut off the heads of attacking serpents, Parfitt's
weapons were persistence and a cool fatalism.

The other type of adventure was scholarly. Parfitt deftly parsed
linguistic curiosities like the word aron, for instance, which in Hebrew
can mean a ringing sound or someone who lays to waste, and is related to
the word iran, which means box--all of which emerge as key pieces of a
puzzle that grows in importance as he nears his quarry. Parfitt
seamlessly fuses western poetry with Biblical passages, quoting T.S.
Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Henry Thoreau. "Only connect," he
muses, referring to E.M. Forster, while he wonders which of several
places with the same names might harbor the Ark or lead him to it. It is
a pleasure to follow his meticulously clear train of thought as he
explains why he accepts, then rejects, various reports of the Ark and
its locations. The writing is bright with Parfitt's vivid and often
very funny descriptions of his colleagues Ben Arieh and Labib, and
although he sometimes falls prey to British snobbery, Parfitt seems
genuinely fond of these two very different men and their unnerving behaviors and talents.

How does this wild and serious trek finally turn out? Here's a
hint: Some readers may already know that male Lemba priests were tested
and found to carry the DNA of the Cohens, the priestly caste of the
Hebrews. But what the ngoma turns out to be, and how it fulfills its
description in the Bible, provides an astonishing and perhaps unsettling conclusion.

The Lost Ark of the Covenant deserves an enthusiastic and careful
reading. But try to resist its fast pace to better savor a thrilling
ride through history, linguistics, genetics and anthropology.

Gloria Levitas is a writer and anthropologist who taught history of
religion and anthropological linguistics at Queens College in New York
City for 27 years. She has written numerous travel articles and reviews
for The New York Times and other publications.

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